Hudinilson Jr.
Fragmentação
1980
Photocopyon paperin nine parts
5.5 x 7.7 in(14 x 19.5 cm) (each)
Hudinilson Jr. (1957-2013) was born and lived in Sao Paolo, Brazil. His public performances, collages, and photocopier-produced works create an image of the sensual and uncontained self, in which the body is both effaced and emphasized. To produce Xerox works like Fragmentação, Hudinilson Jr. would climb naked onto a photocopier to capture various parts of his body and then arrange these scaled down images into a serial grid. As Felipo Scovino notes,“ [t]his effacement of identity is inseparable from the difficulty of living as a gay man under the repressive Brazilian state of the time.” Yet in addition to a flattening of eroticism through a mechanical process, there is also an attempt to transcend mechanical restraints by insisting on the primacy and dynamism of the human body.
The fractured nature of his collages and photocopy works relates also to the physical violence used by the government at the time and the physical degradation of the body caused by AIDS.
In the series of xeroxes (Des)construir Narciso ([De] constructing Narcissus, 2000), he enlarged the X-rays of his broken bones after a fall precipitated by an attempt to evade [a homophobic] attack. And in the late 1980s, he compiled the sickness, physical degradation, and death of Brazilian singer Agenor de Miranda Araújo Neto (better known as Cazuza) in a reference notebook…Hudinilson Jr. prided himself on having created, with Bernardet and Darcy Penteado, what may have been Brazil’s first AIDS prevention poster.
– Paulo Miyada, “To Caress, to Fondle, to Covet: Hudinilson Jr.” Mousse Magazine, July 14, 2020
Provenance
Galerie Jacqueline Martins
See also
Hudinilson Jr. in the collection of the MoMA